Archive: Category: TechPresident

The amazingly productive e-democracy hackers at mySociety.org have rolled out their latest deviously simple web service, GroupsNearYou.com. As mySociety's founder Tom Steinberg explains, "There’s a proven real world social value to people belonging to very local email lists and other forms of local online community. However there is no eBay or Craiglist or other market dominant player in the local online community world, instead there’s a myriad of google groups, yahoo groups, Facebook & other YASN groups, extremely old school CCed email lists, online forums and so on. As a consequence of not having one big simple place to go to find and join local groups (many of which are not even on the web for Google to find) far fewer...

Sometime today, I presume, the Obama campaign will reveal its total fundraising haul for the month of February, and everyone will go gaga. Whatever the actual number--$35 million is the low estimate (which would match the Clinton campaign's take), $70 million is Republican consultant and techPresident blogger Patrick Ruffini's plausible prediction (which would be nearly six times John McCain's reported February income)--it's important to put this into more dramatic perspective. In 2004, when the total US population was about 296 million, the total number of donors giving $200 or more to all federal campaigns and committees--that is, to all presidential and congressional candidates, PACs and party committees--was 1,140,535, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. That is, about .4% of...

The conference season is heating up, and while we're not at TED or BIL or FRED*, Andrew, Josh and I will be busy over the next few weeks. Here are some highlights: --March 4-5, Politics Online, Washington, DC: -Andrew and I are co-moderating a session on "Successful Organizing Using Social Media," and the speakers we're working with are first-rate: Ben Rattray, the CEO and founder of Change.org; Randall Winston, the director of non-profit relations for Project Agape and Facebook Causes; and Allison Fine, the author of "Momentum, Igniting Social Change in the Connected Age." -Josh is speaking on a panel on "Building Grassroots Momentum," along with Alex Hunsucker of Eventful, Amy Rubin of the DSCC and previously with the Edwards campaign; and...

Ralph Nader is announcing his Vice Presidential running mate today at noon, an unorthodox move to some, but required due to the onerous rules regarding petitioning for ballot access in many states. I predict he will pick former U.S. Senator Mike Gravel. I've heard that the two men have been talking, and not long ago the Gravel campaign sent its supporters an email containing a petition to start a joint ticket. Nader/Gravel will merge the walking id of 2008 (Gravel) with its superego (Nader). The results, if nothing else, are sure to be entertaining. The Nader campaign also says its first email fundraising campaign was a success; geared to raise $50,000 from 500 donors in honor of Nader's birthday yesterday, they say...

"Debates give candidates a chance to break loose of YouTube-ification and speak for themselves at length." So wrote New York Times television critic Alessandra Stanley in her analysis of yesterday's presidential debate between Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, the 20th of the primary season. Well, I don't know if TV debates actually give the candidates a chance to speak for themselves at length, as opposed to giving TV personalities a platform to posture as journalists and try to play "gotcha." But that's not what bugs me about Stanley's assertion. It's her implicit conflation of YouTube with the sound-bitification of political coverage. Television is scarce media, and for decades the sound-bite has been shrinking. In the 1968 presidential election, the average network...

Noted conservative commentator William F. Buckley just passed away. Through the magic of YouTube, you can relive his most famous moment in the national limelight, when he debated liberal writer Gore Vidal on the merits of the anti-war protests during the 1968 Chicago Democratic convention. The video quality is lousy, but the sound is good enough for you to hear Vidal refer to Buckley as a "crypto-Nazi" and Buckley to call Vidal a "queer" who should "stay plastered." Sort of puts today's slugfests on the cable chat shows in context, no?...

Ralph Nader is running for president, again. But he has a problem: he doesn't understand the web as well as the web understands him. Message to Ralph: It's not the 1970s any more. It's not even the 1990s any more. In 2000, when Nader made his first serious run for president, he had a substantial base of supporters. (Full disclosure: I was among them.) But that was before the real flowering of the web and the networked public sphere. In 2004, he ran again, but--for obvious reasons--he was far less popular. (You can read some of my criticisms back then here, here and here.) The rationale for his candidacy--that there were no serious differences between John Kerry and George Bush--made...

Does the left have a monopoly on funny satire? Does Final Cut Pro only work on computers owned by progressives? Or is it something in the water? What makes some people "viderate" and others embarrassingly illiterate in what works with online video? I don't know the answer, but this new "No, You Can't -- No, Se Puede" video by the old(!) Billionaires for Bush crowd is the latest "parage" (parody/homage) to hit YouTube in the wake of Will.i.am's hugely popular "Yes, We Can." And it's pretty snarky. Actually, I take it back, clearly owning a Final Cut Pro and possessing an ability to sing does not translate into great political video for some:...

Esther Dyson, a longtime tech industry watcher and pioneer, has an interesting piece up on Huffington Post that I think has relevance for politics online. In "Don't Cry For Me, MicroHoogle," she looks at the current hullaballoo over the Microsoft-Yahoo! potential merger, and argues that "the long-term news is happening closer to home - where users interact among themselves through the Web and through online social networks." On the one hand, she notes how behavioral targeting is getting more precise, as companies ranging from search giant Google to start-ups you've never heard of learn how to work with internet service providers to track users directly (albeit anonymized) and show them highly relevant ads. This approach, she predicts, will get more competitive...

You know when something is spreading online when your friends ask you about it spontaneously. That's how I heard about feminist Robin Morgan's online rallying cry for Hillary Clinton, "Goodbye To All That (#2)," which has been circulating widely since she posted it on the Women's Media Center website on February 2nd. And then Chelsea Clinton started forwarding it around...